L.A. Caveman (6 page)

Jake Tremere

Editor

Her mind managed to make itself heard
over the din of sensation
.

Horrified, she pulled from his grasp
even as one nagging, smug little voice inside her head rebutted
with a sigh and an admiring two thumbs up.

She focused on a random spot of the
brown carpet in front of Jake's boots and gathered her thoughts.
Jesus, what a fool she'd been making of herself! Probably most
women threw themselves at him, but she of all people should’ve
shown more restraint. Roughly one hundred percent more.

She smoothed her T-shirt and shook her
head. Stepping a safe distance from him, her nerves vibrated with
reaction to her own impetuous violence and also his sensuous
onslaught.

What had come over her?

Jake watched her step away. She looked
disturbed.

He shared the sentiment. Kissing
certainly hadn’t been on his agenda.

It had been pure liquid heaven. Her
wholehearted response to him inflamed him like he’d never felt
before. That was mindless abandon. He'd wanted her when she was
writhing against him more than his next breath, and he’d felt the
way her slender, hot little body and eager lips responded to him,
too.

Hell, she was still breathing hard, he
thought with masculine satisfaction. Nothing in his past even came
close to the surprising electricity that had flowed between them.
Not even Jolene.

He looked keenly at Stanna and his
mind cleared further. What was he doing, being proud of himself for
getting her hot? For kissing her, at work? He was smarter than
that.

Issues of sexual harassment liability
aside, he might very well be repeating a mistake he’d made with
Jolene. He didn't want to think of it, but memories of his darling
ex put it into his head: it was possible that Stanna might be a
faker, a user trying to manipulate him with her feminine
wiles.

He exhaled heavily. It had happened to
him before. Guys had a blind spot about pretty women. He just
couldn't afford to be the naive, lost-in-infatuation boy he’d once
been. He certainly couldn’t afford a hostile workplace lawsuit.
Though she had invited his touch. She’d asked for it specifically,
damn it. And she’d actually said he should be able to fire her for
her attack on him, and she was bloody well right. They were even in
terms of office offenses.

He touched his nameplate, caressing it
with his thumb as he worked the possibilities over. No one had more
reason to try and manipulate him than she. He supposed her next
move might be to try to threaten him with exposure of what he’d
just done. Or trade favors. If she thought he played that way, she
had a rude surprise coming.

So her sincere words at first
surprised him, then triggered his reluctant respect. Soft but
emphatic, Stanna's voice underscored her sincerity: "Jake. I'm very
sorry for that. I was totally out of line to try and hit you and
what we just did was a mistake too." Her ragged breath betrayed the
edge on her emotions, but he couldn't tell which edge. Maybe this
time she was going to cry. He found himself rooting for her to
finish so he could apologize, too. He suddenly wanted
to.

She continued in the same controlled
tone. "But I want you to know I still think you're wrong in your
chauvinistic angle regarding my column and my re-assignment as
receptionist."

His urge to apologize vanished. She
was still hung up on that? Now? His suspicion that she might be
trying to manipulate him flitted through his mind, but he was
beginning to believe it wasn't the case. He was beginning to
believe this small-boned, thoroughly female girl in front of him
was disturbingly single-minded.

She was stubborn. He tested his
theory.

"Stanna, you can't write
about--"

"Yes, I can."

Jake stifled a chuckle. He thought
she'd respond that way. In fact, he thought she might say it no
matter the challenge: "Stanna, you can't travel to the moon in an
automobile." He was pretty sure her competitive spirit would kick
in before her common sense and he'd hear "Yes, I can" before she
even heard the whole sentence.

It was weird, being with a woman who
acted as competitive as a man. But whether she liked to admit it or
not, she was still a woman. He took one deliberate step toward her,
and smiled inwardly when she only bristled but didn't back
away.

"If you're planning on kissing me
again, I'll ask you to remember I'm your employee and not your
girlfriend."

Jake smiled wistfully. "A man could
wish things were different."

"Yes, you've made your desire to fire
me well-known to me and everyone else who works here."

With his reminder he was a businessman
and not a date, no matter how thrilling his kisses, Stanna's common
sense came back to her in a rush. It told her to get out of his
office before something really bad happened.

Turning her back on him made the hairs
on the back of her neck stand up. Leaving his office felt like
retreating, even though she was coming right back. She could sense
him watching her.

She wasn't sure if he’d ignore her
signals to stop with the amorous activities. Worse, she wasn't sure
she that she wanted him to. Moving as fast as she could, she strode
to her cube, yanked her column from her notebook, and whirled. She
swallowed as she returned to his office.

He was still by his desk, only he wore
a mocking smile as if he knew the thoughts whirling through her
mind.

Face heated, she stiffly closed the
distance and held out the binder-clamped papers stiff-armed. He
took it from her slowly, with just a raised eyebrow in
question.

"Here’s my column. Do what you see
fit.”

Without looking down at the column,
Jake looked at her steadily. "I always try to." A half-smile played
about his wide, intriguing lips. She noticed his whiskers. He had
the beginnings of what would be a dark shadow on his jaw, and she
knew the firm sandpaper feeling of it rubbing against her tender
flesh. It was odd knowing something so intimate about someone who
was nearly a stranger.

Tearing her eyes from him and feeling
as if she'd lost some undeclared battle, Stanna mumbled, "Great."
She kept her pace to a slow, dignified walk as she exited his
office, when all she wanted to do was leap for the door and run all
the way home.

She shut his door behind her with
exaggerated softness. When her pulse slowed, she started down the
hallway to her desk.

"Hey beautiful." Michael appeared
round a cube-corner and pinned her with his patented gossip-hungry
stare. The vivid white polka dots on his black shirt arrested her
attention. "What have you been keeping from us, Peaches?" Folding
his arms and blocking her path, he cocked his head and raised his
brows in a theatrical gesture that Telly would have
appreciated.

Stanna was tiredly amused. "More than
you could imagine, Cupcake." She tried to move around him, but he
waggled his finger while he shook his head. "You can do better than
that. After that
tantalizing
display of temper you gave us
all this morning I deserve the dirt, and how. C’mon. Spill,
woman!"

She gave Michael what she hoped was a
Mona Lisa smile and made to slip past him.

Rounding the same cube-corner,
Corrinna nearly collided with them both. She added her two cents:
"Stanna! What's going on!" Corrinna, a petite Asian lady who looked
much younger than her thirty-four years, worked in the editorial
department as a copy editor.

Stanna sighed. She wouldn't be allowed
to just forget it. Everyone she worked with, at least the ones she
interacted with directly, would have to be told the background or
else think she was truly a monster.

She tried the ultra-abbreviated
version: "Okay. Basically, he tried to fire me like he did Ian,
found out he couldn't due to a contract I have, and now is making
my life sort of hellish." She shrugged. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
She hoped.

Corrinna nodded understandingly, but a
quizzical expression remained on her face. Michael expressed it:
"That's not good for you. Not a bit of it. However... he seems like
he might... I stress
might
... be a few steps above a
moronic, repulsive slime. But the thing is, he's the head honcho
now. You just don't screw too vigorously with the top dogs. Unless
you’re into getting your hiney gnawed off." He glanced at her hiney
and shrugged. “A bit off the top might not be a bad idea in your
case.” He danced back out of potential fist-range. Corinna just
hook her head, use to it all.

At Stanna's exasperated sigh, Michael
headed off any retort by adding, "Peace, wench! Anyway, let's go to
lunch. I suppose," he looked at her slyly, "you don't want to
invite our handsome, fearless leader to accompany? No?" His heavy
sigh of poignant regret pried a smile from Stanna and a chuckle
from Corrinna.

Stanna found herself grateful for the
little show of support and friendship as their small group piled
into her clean but dented and wood-paneled pea-green station wagon.
She managed to mostly forget that Jake would have read her column
by now, and reacted to it one way or another. Did he mark it up
with his red pencil? Or did he wad it up and throw it
away?

Stanna blew into the first-floor
department feeling worlds better for the late lunch and comradeship
of her co-workers. She'd told them everything. Everything except
her and Jake's kissing mistake. That little tidbit would go to her
grave, she thought, her face heating just with the memory. She
hoped desperately that Jake was a discreet man. Something about the
natural control he usually displayed told her he was.

She stopped at the opening to her
cube, her eyes locked on her In-Box. She couldn't believe it. The
black tray, hanging conspicuously over a corner of her wrap-around
cube-desk, could barely contain all the paper and folders and
envelopes and binder-clamped bills to pay.

Evidently Jake was a man of his word.
She wouldn't see daylight from this storm of paper. Her lunchtime
high abruptly left her, and she collapsed into her chair with a
scowl. She wondered if the phone would start ringing wildly with
everyone's outside calls for her to answer, too. That was part of
the new Stanna-responsibilities, right? Phone jockeying, and maybe
also moving her to that narrow desk by the front door so she could
greet newcomers with a receptionist's plastic smile.

It was a nightmare.

The phone rang.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the
little black instrument. It used to be her friend.

She was a columnist, not a
receptionist. She would be a terrible receptionist,
anyway.

An idea suggested itself and a wicked
smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

Stanna picked up the phone. “Knuckle
Dragger Central, where men are men, and women are zookeepers. What
is the nature of your emergency?”

After a long stretch of silence, Ian's
voice responded, "It didn't take long for things to change around
there, did it?"

"Ian!" Stanna gasped. "That wasn't
what it sounded like. I mean, I thought you were someone else..."
Her face was getting used to the heat of embarrassment.
Floor,
swallow me now.

"Stanna, dear. I do hope you’re quite
all right?" Her previous boss sounded properly solicitous. Maybe a
bit distracted. She could hardly blame him. Losing a job hit one’s
self-esteem and sense of identity, even if Ian had ultimately been
satisfied with the idea. "I was merely calling to see how my
favorite employee -- well, ex-employee now, I suppose -- is
adjusting to the new ownership of
Men's Weekly
. I know it's
only been a matter of days, but I must admit to some feelings of
estrangement not being involved with it any longer."

Stanna twisted the black phone cord in
her fingers thoughtfully. So Ian wasn't happy about leaving. "Well,
I wish you were still here. Jake has already made some incredibly
bad business decisions affecting me directly." She went on to
inform him of her new status and column alteration, getting angry
again as she spoke. "...and that chauvinist pig is actually going
to make me write as a guy! And not even a cool guy, but the kind of
guy who watches other guy's girlfriends' butts! Your leaving is
such a disaster."

Ian's voice resonated with feeling as
he agreed. "That, my dear, is an understatement." He paused, then
added a clipped, "But I wasn't left much of a choice."

Stanna caught herself chewing on a
pencil, and shoved it back into her round pencil holder as she
spoke. "Jake implied that you were glad to accept a generous
severance, so you could retire. I gather that’s not the
truth?"

She heard Ian’s cynical laughter. She
frowned at the jaded bitterness of it. She’d heard him sound like
that before, but rarely. His manner, which she was familiar with
after a full year as his right hand and columnist, was always a
proper, understated one, but she'd sensed something darker beneath
the surface. Something of that darkness now came across over the
phone, and Stanna stared at the phone’s rectangular base as if it
could provide clues about the departed editor.